Attila the Hun (39 page)

‘What do I hear?’ interrupts the king. ‘Whoever inspired unwarlike women with valour?’

And Odabella, Aquileia’s princess, daughter of her slain father, answers
con energia
, several repetitions and a shattering top C, ‘The boundless holy love of our country!’

One line, a plea to Attila by Aetius – the baritone Ezio – quickly became a political slogan:

Avrai tu l’universo
Resti l’Italia a me.
(You may have the whole world,
but leave Italy to me.)

The story-line is complete tosh, with Attila being stabbed to death by his intended wife Odabella, but Ezio’s soulful plea for Rome’s resurrection (
Dagli immortali vertici
/From the immortal peaks) was an instant hit, and the passion of the music has its admirers, which is why the opera is still occasionally performed.
¹

In a few places you can still hear the noise of Attila’s passing echoing faintly. In Udine, not far from Aquileia, they say that the castle-topped hill dominating their town was built by Attila’s hordes, using their helmets as buckets, so that their leader could relish the spectacle of Aquileia in flames. There is one name that acts as a memorial to the Huns: Hunfredus was its original form, a combination of ‘Hun’ and ‘peace’, denoting someone who could make peace with the Huns. Hunfroi, as it was in old French, was brought by the Normans into England, where it became Humphrey, and into Italy as Umberto. Near Châlons, at the northern edge of the Catalaunian Plains, a sign points north-east to ‘Attila’s Camp’, which turns out to be no such thing. The tree-covered mound is a first-century hill-fort, attached to Attila simply because the arrival of the Huns was the biggest thing to happen around that time. If French schoolchildren know anything of Huns, it is Attila’s supposed boast:
Là où mon cheval passera, l’herbe ne repoussera pas
(Wherever my horse passes, the grass will not grow). And, finally, his fame has also kept him alive in film, first in Fritz Lang’s
Kriemhild’s Revenge
(1924), and more recently in a couple of remakes that should not be mentioned except in a footnote.
²

T
he Germans – that is, the Germanic tribes – saw things rather differently, because they had formed part of Attila’s empire. They remembered with greater respect. Between the Germanic-speaking communities of old Europe travelled bards and poets, who sang of past glories, carrying their creations from court to court, commuting from Lombardy in northern Italy to the Gothic capital of Toulouse, the Germanic enclaves in France, the emerging German-speaking lands east of the Rhine and all points northwards. Attila became a famous figure in Germanic lore, which means early English lore as well. He gets a passing mention in the oldest English poem,
Widsith
, probably written in Mercia in the seventh century. All these legends plundered history, distorting it out of recognition into a rag-bag of heroes and wonders and gods and literary motifs.

By the ninth century, Attila was part of Scandinavian sagas as well as Germanic ones. This is odd, because his brief empire hardly touched the Baltic. Yet the Hun imperium, though not Germanic, seems to have been powerful enough to capture folk memory and popular
imagination. Until the last century, ordinary people in north Germany referred to funeral-mounds as
Hunnenbette
, ‘Hun beds’. Thus, among Norwegians and Danes, Attila joined Ermanaric the Ostrogoth and Gundicarius (Gundahar or Gunther) the Burgundian, woven with them into stories to carry grand themes of honour, justice, vengeance and the workings of fate. Vikings carried Attila’s name with them to Iceland in the tenth century, and then beyond, to Greenland, source of the tenth-century
Greenlandic Lay of Atli
(Attila). He went yet further, to the New World with Thorfinn Karlsevni and his 100 Vikings, who in 1018 founded a short-lived colony on the coast of Newfoundland. I imagine them huddling round fires in their turf houses, listening to their bard. No
skraeling
(as the Norsemen called the local Indians and Inuit) would have heard, but it is an odd thought that one of the first musical and poetic works heard in the New World told of Attila, the Huns and their fights with the Burgundians.

For that was the heart of the legends: a minor incident in written sources, but strong in folk memory, probably because it played well as a family feud. Only a few surviving fragments hint at its popularity – a ninth-century Latin epic, German and English versions of the same story, a few Norse sagas. The principal hero is a certain Walther, a hostage at Attila’s court, and a favourite of the king. He flees with a princess, Hildegund (the original German form of Ildico). They have a treasure. The hero Hagen, who may be either a Burgundian or a Hun, pursues them, joined by King
Gunther of the Burgundians. There is a great battle, after which the three heroes are reconciled. In the English version,
Waldere
, part of which survives, Hildegund urges Walther to fight Gunther:

Companion of Attila,

Even Now, in this hour, let neither your courage

Nor your dignity desert you.

This story overlaps with another set of legends, about the Burgundians themselves, a.k.a. the Nibelungs, or Niflungs. Here, as in other strands, poets treated the elements as components for a do-it-yourself epic: you can have Attila enticed by Siegfried (Sigurd in Norse) into Siegfried’s treasure-chamber, where Attila dies; or Attila providing a maiden for Hagen, who begets Aldrian, who does the enticing. In other stories, Hagen also begets Niflung, after whom the whole collection of sagas is named. There is no unity to be found.

Here’s one version.

Gunther the Burgundian (who in real life was killed by the pre-Attila Huns in about 437) has a treasure. He also has a sister, Gudrun, who is married to Attila. Attila, wishing to extort the treasure’s hiding-place from Gunther, kills him by throwing him into a snake-pit. Then Gudrun takes a grisly revenge. In the greatest surviving version of the legend, the
Volsungsaga
, Gudrun holds a grand feast, which she says is to show that she accepts her lot. Far from it. She kills the two boys she has had by Attila, and then, at the feast—

‘The king asked where his sons were. Gudrun replied:
“I will tell you and gladden your heart. You caused me heavy sorrow when you killed my brother. Now you shall hear what I have to tell you. You have lost your sons – on the table both their skulls are serving as cups – and you yourself drank their blood mixed with wine. Then I took their hearts and roasted them on a spit, and you ate them.”’

Taking on the role of Ildico-as-murderess, Gudrun kills Attila in his sleep and burns down the hall of the sleeping Huns.

To this you can add a back-story, that of Brunhild, who is won by Gunther with the help of the hero and dragon-slayer Siegfried, formerly married to Gudrun before Attila. It is from Siegfried that Gunther, having killed Siegfried, acquires the treasure, to get which Attila murders him.

Many of these tales of greed and vengeance play out with Attila as a sort of centre point. He may be a rival for the Nibelungs’ treasure. Or, perhaps because originally he was the non-Germanic outsider, he may have the unlikely role of a powerful, kindly and victimized ruler. That is how he is portrayed in the most famous of medieval German epics, the
Nibelungenlied
, created in about 1200 by some anonymous Homer-like poet from the many current tales. But the Attila of the
Nibelungenlied
is a strangely unassertive figure. In the context of the epic’s time, he exemplifies the two highest virtues of kingship: faithfulness and mildness. But this makes him rather useless in dramatic terms. He is ignorant of almost everything that matters. He doesn’t know that his wife, Kriemhild, mourns her
former husband Siegfried. He hasn’t a clue about the tensions between the visiting Burgundians and his own Huns. He suspects nothing even when the Burgundians attend church in full armour. It is Kriemhild who dictates the action, keeping him in the dark. Nothing could be more at odds with the historical Attila, the cunning Attila whose careful records so embarrassed Priscus and his diplomatic mission, the Attila who built a nation and an empire, and challenged both Constantinople and Rome.

Faithfulness and mildness were not good qualities for blue-blooded heroism, which was part of the problem faced by nineteenth-century German writers who wrestled to adapt this national treasure. The philosopher Georg Hegel thought the whole thing should be dumped as reactionary, irrelevant, trivial and trite; better for writers in need of sources to focus on Germany’s real roots, Christianity and the Roman empire. Writers took no notice. Besides Werner’s lamentable drama, there were five more Attila plays in German in the nineteenth century, followed by another four in the twentieth. The playwright Friedrich Hebbel tried a Hegelian synthesis in a Nibelung trilogy performed in 1861, filling Attila with Christian virtues, so that his death leads on to a brave new Christian world.

It was Wagner who saw how best to handle Attila. In the four operas of his Ring cycle, he did what a good bard would have done: he cherry-picked what best suited him from Germanic and Norse legends, opted mainly for Norse mythology – a hoard of gold, a Ring
of Power, a Helmet of Invisibility, gods, giants, a dragon, magical warrior-maidens – rejected history, and dropped Attila completely.

P
erhaps the folk memories would have died, but for Europe’s descent into new forms of barbarism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given the right circumstances, outrage and prejudice had a ready-made symbol. Those circumstances first arose in the Franco-German War of 1870 (usually called ‘Franco-Prussian’ by British historians, but Prussia was already Germany, as near as made no difference).

In the summer of 1870 the Germans killed 17,000 French soldiers and took 100,000 prisoner at Sedan, and headed on south, towards Châlons and the Catalaunian Plains, for the same geostrategic reasons as Attila – open spaces, fast progress – except that their target was Paris. A widely syndicated newspaper article that October made the obvious equation between the invading Germans and the Huns, compared Kaiser Wilhelm I to Attila and recalled the tale of how St Genevieve saved Paris. Now, as then, God would help those who helped themselves; and so he did, apparently. Encumbered by prisoners – by the very weight of their success – then slowed by French guerrilla attacks, the Prussian army stuttered to a halt. The western limit of their advance, rather oddly, was Orléans, where Attila had turned back. The armistice that followed confirmed Germany in the French imagination as Europe’s latter-day Huns.

For the next 40 years, the great powers stared at each
other with narrowed eyes, each seeing treachery and barbarism in the others. The French, in particular, seethed in humiliation and impotence, waiting for a chance for
revanche
on these reincarnated Huns.

Actually, the Germans welcomed the comparison. When Germany sent off troops to China to confront the Boxers, the peasant rebels who in 1900 sought to drive all foreigners from China, Kaiser Wilhelm II told his soldiers: ‘Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns a thousand years ago under the leadership of Attila gained a reputation by virtue of which they live in historical tradition . . . so may the name of Germany become known in such manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again dare even look askance at a German.’

German nationalism went hand in hand with German imperialism. Seeing rival imperialists all around – France, Russia, Britain – Germany seized new colonies and built a fleet to equal that of Britain, the world’s superpower. It was Britain’s ruling class, therefore, that felt the threat of German expansion most keenly. One among them was the literary guardian of empire and Englishness, Rudyard Kipling.

It was Kipling who first brought to English readers the French equation of German with Hun. In 1902 he was inspired by a long-forgotten incident in which Germany proposed a joint naval demonstration to collect debts from Venezuela. Kipling, incensed at the very idea of co-operating with Germany, put his anger into the mouths of oarsmen who symbolize those who toil worthily for king and empire:

And you tell us now of a secret vow
You have made with an open foe!

‘The Rowers’ now sounds obsessive, obscure, self-righteous and thoroughly blimpish, a rhyming harrumph from some peppery colonel.

In sight of peace – from the Narrow Seas
O’er half the world to run –
With a cheated crew, to league anew
With the Goth and the shameless Hun!

Twelve years later, Kipling’s fears came true, without any recognition from him that British and German imperialism were opposite sides of the same coin. Germany, though, faced a unique problem: the near-certainty of war on two fronts, against both France and Russia. The key to victory was the rapid conquest of France, which meant a fast advance through neutral Belgium, any hint of opposition or delay to be dealt with ruthlessly. Thus, in Germany’s case, war had to involve an unprovoked invasion of a neutral country and a readiness to use terror. It was virtually inevitable that theory would become practice, which it did a few days after Germany’s advance into Belgium in August 1914. In the university town of Leuven (Louvain), a few Belgian snipers provoked a dreadful over-reaction, which proved a propaganda gift to Germany’s opponents. Hundreds were killed, thousands imprisoned, 1,000 buildings burned, including the ancient library and its 230,000 books. On 29 August
The
Times
deplored the loss of the ‘Oxford of Belgium’, at the hands of ‘the Huns’. Kipling himself urged Britain into war: